Here's another reason to stand up tall: When going through a painful experience, whether physical or emotional, your posture can make difference in how stressful or painful the event is for you, studies suggest.

Medical News Today suggests making experiences less stressful by making your body more expansive, rather than our typical reflex to crawl up into a ball, based on a few studies including this one:

The study, "It Hurts When I Do This (or You Do That)" published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found that by simply adopting more dominant poses, people feel more powerful, in control and able to tolerate more distress. Out of the individuals studied, those who used the most dominant posture were able to comfortably handle more pain than those assigned a more neutral or submissive stance.

Those with the more submissing pose showed lower pain thresholds.

Advertisement

It's possible that keeping your chin up (literally) may also help with distressing emotional events. Photo by Marion Doss.